What
has happened to the American suburb? Once the utopian locale where city
and country met, where nature and culture were brought into polite conversation,
the suburb is no longer a pastoral borderland or even the mundane stage
- set for middle America's sit-com fantasies.

Only a few generations since the heady days of postwar triumphalism,
the friendly suburb has mutated into sinister sprawl. As Andres Duany,
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck report in their recent manifesto
Suburban Nation, those cheerful ranch houses arrayed in spotless, assembly-line
rows on idyllic virgin land have mutated into swirling viruses of McMansions,
garage-fronted stucco shacks and cul-de-sacs pushing their way relentlessly
into imperiled wetlands and forest belts.

These much-heralded - and much-derided - pioneers of "new urbanist" architecture
are confident that they have a popular antidote to sprawl. They are no
doubt on to something, having made very successful careers out of stumping
for a return to the "traditional neighborhood." They claim this buried,
longed-for tradition was the dominant form of Western habitation before
the mid-20th century, originally evolving, they write, "organically as
a response to human needs" in the form of "mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly
communities of varied population, either standing free as villages or
grouped into towns and cities."

But reading Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen's new history, Picture
Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, next to the architects' impassioned
plea is instructive. In the hands of these historians, the suburb becomes
not an anesthetized state of mind but a flawed and tragic chapter in the
noble story of "America's attempts to provide housing to all of its citizens."
If the new urbanists find suburbs wanting for "a physical framework conducive
to public discourse," Baxandall and Ewen counter with the suggestion that
postwar suburbs never truly provided an easy escape from the cacophony
of civic life. Using Long Island as an historical laboratory, they trace
its development from farmland to leisure-class retreat to mass-marketed
worker's paradise, stressing throughout the struggles over race and class
that transformed the landscape of Walt Whitman's Paumanok into Levittown.